The Brooklyn Nets, my local basketball outfit, were eliminated from the NBA playoffs Saturday night, surrendering with little resistance in Game 7 of their first-round series to the Chicago Bulls. Brooklyn lost despite owning home court, despite the Bulls shedding multiple players to injury and plague, despite Rihanna shimmering courtside, despite a fancy new arena that looks like a rusted turtle. Oh well. It's the franchise's inaugural season in town. Not a disastrous Year One. It's time for a mental siesta. Time for Nets fans to think about something other than basketball. Time for an off-season.

Or not. Is there such a thing as a sports off-season anymore? It used to be, not long ago, that the conclusion of your team's season put a healthy halt on your attention. Maybe you'd watch other teams in the playoffs, if you could stomach it, but soon it was on to something completely different. Baseball. Hockey. Talking to your children and pets. Detailed projects involving yarn. It was a natural break that allowed emotional wounds to heal and enthusiasm to regenerate. An off-season wasn't just useful for players. An off-season was also for you. And yarn. Lots of yarn.

Except now there's no off-season. There really isn't. There's a season, and there are games, and perhaps playoff games, unless you live someplace like Charlotte or Sacramento, where the postseason is banned by municipal ordinance. But the games are just a fraction of the sports fan's obligation. The other part of following a sports team is the yearlong, all-consuming white noise of gossip and conjecture: hirings, firings, trades, executive machinations and maneuvers that sometimes happen but usually don't. This stuff has always occurred but now it's goosed and amplified and elevated into a mandatory part of the experience, requiring an attention span stretching well beyond the reasonable boundaries of the season. It's exhausting. Sports are no longer hobbies. They've become graduate school.

And there's just an assumption that this is good, good, good, that holding an audience's attention 12 months of the year is a brilliant marketing strategy that carries no risk of audience burnout. There's no pause to think that maybe a degree of rationing might be useful, just to allow fans to recharge and maybe see a movie. A movie? Why, aren't you fancy! A serious fan would be breaking down film and analyzing college prospects. If not college prospects, high-school prospects. If not high-school prospects, eighth-graders. This stuff is 24-7, baby. More is always better. Get with the program.

The greatest example of off-season creep is the NFL, a near-religion which has successfully repositioned itself from a fall-to-winter pastime to a daily relationship, to be attended to constantly. Football is relentless. After the final whistle of Super Bowl, everyone is treated to an approximately 15-minute nap. Then it's immediately on to next year—which teams are getting better, which ones are getting worse, and then the NFL combine, in which prospects inside an unoccupied stadium run and jump. This drama is about as exciting as…people running and jumping inside an unoccupied stadium. Then, of course, comes the NFL player draft, the zenith of off-season events—a series of telephone calls and bear hugs reimagined as prime-time entertainment. Exactly how entertaining it is, is a matter of opinion. The NFL draft is commonly described as "great theater," which should immediately make one wonder what constitutes bad theater.

But the draft doesn't need to be Hamlet. It needs only to exist, because the appetite for football is so intense. So the draft is corn feed, liberally spread. It is also upbeat, which is probably 90% of its appeal. The draft inverts the NFL hierarchy—the bad teams, punch lines September through January, get the best picks and command most of the attention. Fans of the Kansas City Chiefs or New York Jets get to have serious conversations about the future of the Kansas City Chiefs and the New York Jets, and nobody breaks into sidesplitting laughter. It is an optimist's paradise.

One could argue that football, with its jewel-box 16-game season, is already a sport less about the action than the spaces in between. But the busier sports are trying to thrill up the calendar. Even baseball televises its draft—held during the playing season—which is hilarious, since player development in baseball takes far longer than most sports. (Watching a baseball draft is like watching the planting of an oak tree.) There's summer-league NBA to follow and signing day and of course the heat-seeking thrill circus that is intrasquad spring college football. All of these things have been around forever, but now they are urgently packaged and sold as essential and important. We haven't even gotten to the protracted personnel dramas—the free-agent sagas and multiplayer deals and the malcontents trying to talk themselves out of town. Those can inhale the better part of an entire off-season. The NBA is about to enter its third consecutive round of Dwight Howard speculation. Please no. Not even Dwight Howard thinks Dwight Howard is that interesting.

On and on it goes. The evil media, naturally, is partly to blame here—the proliferation of cable and Internet options and 24-hour coverage cycles demanding content. The dialogue is endless; veracity isn't essential; today's trade rumor is just tomorrow's knocked-down speculation. (How amusing it is to hear news networks criticized for sketchy information during a breaking news story: That is the sports world every day.) Now the leagues all have their own bespoke networks, too, though sometimes there's not enough news to fill the day. If you turn on the NFL Network between midnight and 5 a.m., for example, it just shows a live cam of Bill Belichick opening and closing his garage door.

In this nonstop attention and blurring of seasonal boundaries it's possible to see a parallel to the "specialization" culture that has become common in youth sports; this is the notion that a serious junior hockey or baseball or squash player needs to be serious 12 months of the year, which probably results in some college scholarships but mostly leads to a lot of grumpy parents standing in ice rinks in August. Specialization is losing its fashion—coaches and orthopedists believe such single-minded focus contributes to player fatigue and stress injuries, and suggest that child athletes try other things. It's not bad advice for sports fans as well. Some healthy "off" should return to the off-season.

On Sunday, the Brooklyn Nets released their coach, P.J. Carlesimo. There's reportedly a host of candidates to replace him. There's no timetable. Decide in May. Decide in June. Decide whenever. Could they be interested in Dwight Howard? The draft is June 27. Pay attention. Discuss at any time. The action never stops.

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